Dell Intros 'Future-Ready' Enterprise Flash Storage

The inexorable migration to flash-based enterprise storage continues. Following on the heels of IBM's new enterprise flash storage solutions announced a couple weeks ago, Dell Inc. yesterday introduced its own all-flash and hybrid flash offerings.

The company said its Dell Storage Center Operating System 7 (SCOS 7) "aggressively promotes the adoption of flash, elevates and abstracts data control through increased virtualization, and unifies Dell's storage ecosystem across multiple portfolios. The release provides new intelligence and flexibility to help businesses 'flash-forward,' advancing their infrastructures to meet today's needs and prepare for future challenges."

Dell said its SC Series now includes all-flash tiers for less than $0.45/GB, with hard-drive tiers less than $0.10/GB net effective capacity.

"SCOS 7 makes leading-edge storage technology practical for more workloads, enabling a fundamental transformation of the datacenter by eliminating acquisition cost barriers for flash and lowering ongoing expense with simplified management and increased efficiency," the company said.

Benefits of the new offerings listed by Dell include:

Helps lower acquisition costs across flash and hybrid arrays.

Helps lower lifecycle costs through elevated, simplified management.

Increased flexibility to respond to business and technology changes.

Enhanced support for virtualization and cloud strategies.

Increased portfolio-level investment protection.

The company said increased support for VMware, cloud and multi-tenancy environments provides better flexibility, virtualization and control. Intelligent Deduplication and improved Intelligent Block-Level Compression are reportedly capable of delivering up to 10:1 capacity savings across both flash and disk tiers, while better storage management capabilities help enterprises react to changing requirements more quickly with less disruption.

"Dell's SC Series has always been an extremely progressive storage platform -- and SCOS 7 is by far our most revolutionary software release to date," said exec Alan Atkinson. "We designed the SC platform from the ground up to be future ready and this release takes flash, deduplication and system intelligence to the next level."